Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2 page)

Change

She had dismantled her altar. the candles, plentiful and varied, honoring deities from the Virgen de Guadalupe to Che, Jesus to her friend Sarah Jane, who’d been shot to death by death squads in Honduras, rested now in a large box beside the door. Her imposing poster of the languid and regal Quan Yin was rolled up and secured with a blue string, her classical Buddha who had begun to look like Ram Dass on acid she had draped with a purple cloth.

Her life was changing. She had felt it begin to shift beneath her feet. Or above her feet, because the change had started in her knees. In her fifty-seventh year they had, both of them, mysteriously, out of the blue, begun to creak.

At first she thought it was her shoes, an ancient pair of running shoes, noiseless as morning until then. Perhaps it was an article of clothing closer to her ear. But no, it was her knees. They creaked like unoiled door hinges. No bird, flying beside her as she ran, could make such a squawk. It seemed terrible to her. A failing of her always so quiet and unobtrusive body. The body of a farm girl—sturdy, peasant dependable—but also the body of a dancer—ever graceful, gliding through her days. But no more.

To her ears now every move was announced. She was unnerved.

She went, as soon as she could fathom where to go, to visit a knee specialist. To a woman who worked on the joints of athletes. This woman manipulated her knees, her legs, frowned, and ended the session by telling her to stretch every morning. To bring her calves to rest on the countertop in her kitchen while the coffee perked. Furthermore, said this woman, it would probably be useful if you invested in orthotics.

She did. And soon felt balanced, for the first time, perhaps, in her life. Until the constant change of shoes, the need to wear sandals in summer, the urge to walk barefoot on the beach, and in her own yard, stopped her. After this, wrenching pain in her hips, as her body sought to realign itself in patterns it had always known.

Her lover was still supple enough never to have experienced an ache in any part of his body except his head. He’d never experienced a creak anywhere. He was so inexperienced he could not hear her creakiness. He failed to grasp why such a small thing unsettled her. She, surely one of the people born “a big strong woman,” such as Holly Near sang about. She wanted kisses on her knees that he could not remember to offer; nor could he understand, exactly, why kisses should be needed. It boded ill for them.

The lover before him would have understood perfectly. A woman closer to her own age, this lover had been capable of endlessly babying her, of kissing any bruise or pain, no matter how slight. Alas, she had soon enough felt smothered, and flown the too cozy nest. Still, at times like this, she missed having a lover who could feel, empathize with, her aging body.

She had dismantled her altar. Even the photographs of her parents—her mother radiant as a sun, her father glowing as a moon—she had taken down. They now were on the floor, facing the mud-colored wall. For hours she had sat gazing into their beloved faces; all criticism of them forgotten; all complaints exhausted. Nothing remained but love. Not even desire to see them again remained; and she had been disconsolate when they had both died suddenly, when a train rammed their car, and she’d spent years thinking she might turn a corner somewhere and see them, catch up to them, as it were, because, curiously, in her imagination, they were always on a path ahead of her; she saw their backs, dissolving around a long curve in the trail.

This room, her altar room, resembled a cave. Dark and quiet, like being in the earth, and the candles had been like a hearth, a fire pit, beckoning one to come forward and sit.

This was no longer the case. All now was in disarray. Her surroundings mirrored a dissolution she felt growing inside herself. And though she had loved her home, her berry-colored house with starry blue trim, she thought frequently of selling it. She even thought of giving it away. It did not seem important, though for years she’d jumped for joy each time she managed to pay the mortgage or to add some small or large improvement. Now she dreaded thinking about its needs. She noticed a shabbiness creeping in, she who had been so fastidious and never left a single broken thing unrepaired. She found she cared little that the paint over the fireplace was beginning to peel, that the door to the kitchen didn’t quite close. That there was a leak beside the bathtub drain. She even thought about these things positively, in some new and quite weird way. She could feel her house dissolving around her, as her parents dissolved when she daydreamed them. And there was a feeling of relaxing, of letting go, that was welcome.

Every word she wrote now she thought of burning. Old journals she gathered in a pile. To save in already overstuffed cupboards? Or to burn? And one day, ceremonially, she burned not only some of her writing but several hundred-dollar bills, just to demonstrate to herself that these items were not the God/Goddess of her life. Her friends grew quite alarmed. She began to dream each and every night that there was a river. But it was dry. There she’d be in the middle of an ancient forest searching for her life, i.e., the river, and she would find it after a long journey, and it would be sand.

Her pens as well seemed to go empty on her. An unusual number of them, though practically brand new, refused to scratch more than a few pale lines. No matter that she banged them in frustration on the desktop. Her eyes dimmed. Nor could her new reading glasses often be found. Was it the end? she thought. Or what?

And so her friends—the ones in her psyche and the ones sitting around her dining table—said: You must find a real river somewhere in the world—forget the dry one in your dreams—to travel down. They suggested one of the deepest, swiftest, most challenging of all: the Colorado.

She went. Taking just her light duffel of hiking and sleeping gear, mosquito repellant, aspirin, and a walking stick a friend had carved from a twig, lovely in its lightness and the color of dried hemp, she started on this journey. They had told her the river was wide. They had told her it was cold and deep. They had told her it roared through the Grand Canyon like a locomotive. They had forgotten to mention there were rapids. And so, the night before the start of the river run, in a motel room not far from the Grand Canyon’s rim, reading at last the material that had been sent to her by the able women who would steer her boat and the boats of the nine other women journeying also, she sat bolt upright in bed, startling her companion, a friend of many kind and unkind years.
Merde,
she said (though she was not French or of that ancestry); there are rapids involved!

Not small, barely perceptible ripples on the river, but mighty upheavals of the river itself. The river, in fact, with its twenty- and thirty-foot waves, roiling beneath their tiny wooden dories, would attempt, daily, to dislodge them. She, having read about this, barely slept. And yet, it did not occur to her to turn back.

When she did sleep, for a few blissful minutes just before dawn, at which time they were to leave the motel, she dreamed she was in a high-rise building, living there, and that she was informed it was time for the water to rise. She thought this meant the water would rise perhaps to the level of the gutter outside the front door. But no, a cheerful dark woman waved from the control room of the global water department, high above her own dwelling, and, pulling a lever, instigated a flow of dark water, so dark a water it resembled oil, and all the floors beneath her were soon submerged. And then her own flat was flooded. She wondered of course if she would drown. But apparently not: By some fate she seemed to swim well in oil and water and she marveled that in the world of nondream these two were said not to mix.

She whispered her dream to her buddy Avoa. Who yawned, smiled at her, and said: Hmmm. Oil and water. Both. Sounds refreshing and rich. Before disappearing into the shower. Kate lay abed a few moments longer, musing.

Her lover, Yolo, had watched her leave. A compact, muscular woman with good skin and creamy white teeth, a woman no longer sure there was a path through life or how indeed to follow one if there was. He’d folded her in his arms, yawning as he stretched her slightly backward. It was already over between them. Both of them felt it. Her journey now was to be with women. Only women. Because of women. And partly because she had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry.

He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?

And she left. He watched the green shuttle stop, the driver lift in her gear, her sleep-creased face appear in a window. Then with a wave, a rapping of her stick against the pane, she was gone. He would have driven her to the airport had she wanted it. But no, she had wanted to leave her house heading directly into her journey. No long cuddles near the ticket counter, no second thoughts about whether they would be all right. It was like her to want it this way. No fuss. She would meet up with Avoa on the way, perhaps in Phoenix, and then the two of them would be off, as they seemed to manage to do now just about every year.

And feeling somewhat abandoned,
left,
he indulged his critical mind: She was not much of a housekeeper. He thought this while picking up one of his socks he’d discarded near the door. And grimaced at the inner critic. See, he said aloud, what do you know? He went inside the house, and while making a cup of coffee noticed a cobweb already beginning to attach itself to his cup. It made him laugh. To him, this was the way of Life. Turn your back for only a moment while the water boils and you are lost in the scent of things to come, and Life puts out a tentacle to grab some part of you. Even the cup from which you prepare to drink is already being pulled if only so slightly back to the ground. A ground that moves, changes, endlessly, but is, paradoxically, always the same. Or it had been the same until, as the old ones used to say, here lately. These “old ones” were, generally speaking, her old ones, but she shared them with him; a quaintness of expression, a drollness of thought, that she seemed to garner directly from her dreams. She might awake laughing anytime whether day or night and expose him to frolicsome goings-on, pithy sayings, the oddest
bon mot
from perhaps a century or so ago. Sometimes he’d cry: “I don’t get it.” And she’d laugh harder and say: “Well, I guess you’d just have to have been there!”

He would miss her. He already did so. Nothing to do, immediately, but go back to bed. To burrow under a comforter still warm from her body, still fragrant with her always fresh, slightly spicy scent. In a room in which there were always flowers, and candles, and a feel of the music that she so often played. Haydn and Beethoven, of course, and also the Beatles, Robbie Robertson and Red Road, and always and for endless hours, Sade and Al Green. Because
they
know how to love! she cried.

Drifting off into a minor squall of despair, an eddy of disappointment, and while hugging her pillow with the mixed emotions of loss, lust, and resentment, he fell asleep. And began immediately to dream. There is a path just ahead of him. Now he sees a large brown foot, hesitant, upon it. A green hobbitlike creature sits on its big toe, riding it as if it were a pony. The toe turns into a side trail. The trail disappears in the brush. The hobbit creature vanishes from sight, his green eyes, like his green leafy cap, sparkling.
You are lost, my boy,
the spirit being says.

Wait!
he calls.
Which way to the river?

His own shout, and the desperation with which he calls out, awakens him. He lies cradling her pillow, suddenly knowing it isn’t over between them. That it will now never be, no matter that they may soon part. He has somehow joined her journey.

Hallelujah, he shouts, flinging aside the comforter, kicking away the covering quilt, giving her pillow a loud smack of a kiss, and heading jubilantly for the shower.

It blesses him. Never before, he feels, has he understood water. It cascades down his tight, healthy skin, and covers him, where the sun falls, with crystal beads of light. It astonishes him that in its purity, in its speed in covering his body, it has no scent. He smells only himself, earthy, rich, a friendly scent, he thinks, bemused, and the soap he holds, which is lemony. Also earthy, he thinks.

He thinks of how they met. She’d pursued him. After seeing one of his paintings of the desert. How can it move me so, she’d cried, gazing in rapture at a large canvas on which there was little other than space, sky, brown earth, and a large cactus. It is so empty!

Because emptiness, space, is our true home? he’d replied, amused by her enthusiasm, and that she’d called in the middle of the night to again pose the question.